I'm a technology, privacy, and information security reporter and most recently the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, a chronicle of the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks and beyond.
I've covered the hacker beat for Forbes since 2007, with frequent detours into digital miscellania like switches, servers, supercomputers, search, e-books, online censorship, robots, and China. My favorite stories are the ones where non-fiction resembles science fiction. My favorite sources usually have the word "research" in their titles.
Since I joined Forbes, this job has taken me from an autonomous car race in the California desert all the way to Beijing, where I wrote the first English-language cover story on the Chinese search billionaire Robin Li for Forbes Asia. Black hats, white hats, cyborgs, cyberspies, idiot savants and even CEOs are welcome to email me at agreenberg (at) forbes.com. My PGP public key can be found here.

As Edward Snowden’s leaks have spilled the NSA’s guts over the last three months, it’s become the punching bag of choice for civil liberties advocates. Now the American Civil Liberties Union wants to make sure that we don’t forget about the other three-letter agency that has vastly expanded its domestic surveillance powers since 9/11: the FBI.

In a 63-page report to be released Tuesday morning, the ACLU is putting new pressure on the FBI, calling on the U.S. Attorney General and Congress to reign in the Bureau’s power to surveil Americans’ phone calls under the Patriot Act, restrict its ability to access Americans’ online data without a warrant, and take measures to prevent its surveillance focus on religious and ethnic minorities. “The [ACLU has] long warned that turning the FBI into a domestic intelligence agency by providing it with enhanced surveillance and investigative authorities that could be secretly used against Americans posed grave risks to our constitutional rights,” the report reads. “This is what a domestic intelligence enterprise looks like in our modern technological age.”

The ACLU’s renewed focus on the FBI may seem strange given the recent string of bombshell leaks about the NSA. But its report emphasizes that the NSA’s collection of millions of Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint users’ cellphone metadata under the 215 section of the Patriot Act–perhaps the most controversial of the stories to follow NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures–has only been possible because of the FBI’s powers to secretly demand that phone companies turn over that data, before handing it to the NSA. “The critical role of one agency deeply involved in this scandal has not been fully examined…even though it requested the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] Court order compelling companies to participate in the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program,” writes the ACLU’s Matthew Harwood in a blog post introducing the report. “That agency is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Aside from describing how the FBI enables the NSA’s surveillance, the report goes on to accuse the bureau of abuses on more than a dozen different topics. A few of its points:

Since 2008, according to the report, the FBI has engaged in thousands of investigations of individuals without reasonable suspicion, opening investigations on 82,000 subjects from 2009 to 2011 alone while only finding information that justified such an investigation in 3,500 of the cases.

Aside from the Section 215 orders sent to telecom firms, the FBI secretly demands hundreds of thousands of individuals’ data from phone and Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook using so-called National Security Letters–it sent 140,000 between 2003 and 2005 alone, almost half of which were targeted at Americans.

The report claims that the FBI has racially profiled communities across America to focus its surveillance, including Chinese and Russian Communities in San Francisco, Latinos in New Jersey and Alabama, African Americans in Georgia, and Middle-Eastern communities in Detroit.

The ACLU writes that by exempting the FBI from the Whistleblower Protection Act, Congress has allowed it to intimidate internal whistleblowers–28% of staff say they’ve witnessed but never reported misconduct. And it points out that the Bureau has engaged in recent campaigns of surveilling journalists to identify their government sources, including the staff of the Associated Press and a Fox News reporter.

The report also highlights that despite FBI’s growing surveillance powers, it remains incompetent at its core crime-fighting job, noting that according to the FBI’s own data more than half of 1.2 million violent crimes in 2011 went unsolved.

Little if any of the ACLU’s lengthy report presents new facts, but it presents a damning portrait of the FBI in the post-9/11 era, ranging from its controversial construction of domestic terrorist plots to lure potential attackers to the No-Fly List.

I’ve contacted the FBI’s press office for comment and will update this post if they respond to the ACLU’s criticism.

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ok fbi is looking at all phone,email,chats,etc., but the ones who are watching are not qualified,they are just bodies to fill the chairs,just review the big criminals-very few are being investigated,…… example – russian mafia in america is booming with epidemic results,….public corruption is everywhere,especially along the beach.

Notice the sleight-of-hand here. The ACLU and EFF and similar groups were screaming hysterical hypotheticals about Snowdens’ leaks for weeks since he defected for to China, then to Russia. They never came up with any solid cases of the COINTELPRO type of the 1960s. They only came up with legal procedures or technical processes they didn’t like and felt suspicious about.

In reams of stuff leaked, not one single case.

So now they’ve switched the narrative over not to materials leaked, and not to actual documented proof of wrongdoing from the government’s secret files, but *their own* hypotheses about thousands of cases *they* think represent wrong doing.

Once again, I’m not seeing specific cases. For example, it’s absolutely right to watch the Russian emigre communities. They are the source of serious crimes. The largest Medicaid fraud in history with over a hundred defendants came from the Russian emigre community, and there are numerous cases of everything from serious domestic violence leading to murders of women, grisly mafia style murders, gasoline and cigarette and other contraband scams, credit card and bank fraud and on and on. OF COURSE you keep a watch on communities where crimes occur, and where the victims are above all THE OTHER members of THOSE SAME communities.